


I was born to surround you in flowers

by moor



Series: Tumblr request [45]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Drama, EWE, F/M, Romance, The Little Things, saying things without words
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-01
Updated: 2019-06-01
Packaged: 2020-04-06 02:07:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19053082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moor/pseuds/moor
Summary: ItaSaku. Based on prompt from @fallinginlovebythemilligram (thank you!), "I was born to surround you in flowers".





	I was born to surround you in flowers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fallinginlovebythemilligram](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=fallinginlovebythemilligram).



There was a strange energy that morning as Sakura left her cute, single storey home. She had lived there for several years as Konoha rebuilt itself. It was a gift from Tsunade, Kakashi and Yamato for her dedication in battle… and was conveniently located only a few minutes from Konoha General. She’d originally rolled her eyes at how unsubtle the gesture had been, however too grateful to let her pride reject it. After fighting in a war, finding and losing her love to a life of Atonement, and deciding to move on, Sakura knew that returning home to live with her parents wouldn’t be for her. She still visited them frequently, but she’d become an adult. She dealt with life and death on a daily basis. She decided who lived and died. Moving out on her own was something she needed. 

The other reason she required her own place was that her teammates, friends, and other colleagues occasionally showed up unannounced at night, wounded and not wanting to bother her, but could she just quickly check them out because this wound hadn’t set quite right and now it was kind of infected and stretched with puss and—

Yes, Sakura wasn’t about to have mystery nin in her family’s home. Most of the time she quickly realized who they were, but then someone had shared her address with an ANBU team and those jerks obviously didn’t take their secrecy vows sincerely enough because now she had them showing up, too.

Sometimes they brought their friends and allies.

It was a regular party in her infirmary home.

The majority repaid her in one way or another—thank you for the offer again Genma, but no, not like that—and whichever ANBU was on duty to monitor her home on their rounds somehow convinced the current Hokage, Naruto, to ease off on her hospital duties when she’d had a really long night. Which lead to many of her guests being as respectful of her time as they could. 

There were some mysterious strangers, though, whom she could not pin down.

They appeared in ANBU attire, their gray, androgynous vests and masks concealing their physique and identities. Sakura had wondered about them most of all, since… she had a feeling they weren’t entirely what they seemed. And by that, she meant that she suspected they were not alive.

Perhaps that was the wrong way to put it, she thought again as she locked her door and reset her traps. She peeked over the edge of her front porch into the garden she never had time to properly care for. To her surprise, someone had weeded and tidied it. She froze in her tracks, distracted.

With a small wince that apparently her neighbours had become so fed up with her (and her constant stream of uninvited guests), Sakura mentally thanked whichever one had done the small chore and offered a small prayer to the gods that they were not being passive aggressive. She would get to to the gardening. Eventually.

With the chilly spring air buffeting her shoulder-length pink hair, Sakura set off for the hospital with a small yawn. It had been a long night.

* * *

  
Several days later, as Sakura left for work at the hospital, bleary eyed again from another long night, she noted her front garden was still tidy. It was so tidy that she managed to spot the small shoots popping up from the now-tended, plot. Tender green stems, still folded over with tiny bulbs on the ends of their stalks poked bravely out of the hard ground, defiant against the cold weather.

The next day their bulbs were white, and the day after they bloomed.

“Snowdrops,” said Sakura, smiling to herself. She left for work happier than she had been in weeks. Someone had planted snowdrops in her garden.

* * *

 

The months went on. Her visitors continued, as did her mystery guests. She supposed they wore the ANBU uniform to prevent her from asking too many questions, but there was one she always felt more comfortable around.

His voice was gentle. He spoke little, yet was excessively respectful of her space and time. Often he’d done a respectable job of bandaging his own wounds, the ones she could see, and only requested her assistance with poisons or internal bleeding.    
He was one of her mystery guests.    
His dark hair was long. She knew what name she wanted to call him. Who he felt like. Who he smelled like, when she remembered the war. 

But… he and all those others like him, they hadn’t… after Kaguya’s fall… they hadn’t… 

Biting the inside of her lip, Sakura focused on the injury in front of her. 

“What territory were you in?” she asked, spotting the spidery purple veins that looked like lightning, shooting from the puncture wound on his transverse abdominal. Even to the naked eye she could track its rate of progression. “You said this was three days ago?”

“Wave,” he answered softly. He sat on her Examination Couch, a cotton sheet beneath him as he reclined against the back of the couch. 

“You made it back from Wave in three days?”   
“It was necessary.”

Sakura nodded, standing and twisting to reach for her bowl of water. “I’m going to draw out what I can. Let me know if this gets too uncomfortable.”

“Ah.”

His ‘ah’ was so familiar it almost hurt.

Combining her healing jutsu with the water to purify the area around the wound and then gently draining the poison from it, Sakura worked steadily to pull back what she could. Some poison had already made it into the ANBU’s bloodstream, but hopefully once she identified it she could dose him with the antidote for any remaining effects.

“You’re supposed to go to the hospital for poisons and infections,” she reminded him.   
“Hn,” he replied.

The ‘hn’ made her heart ache.

Sakura recognized the poison as soon as she saw it under a microscope. A microscope that had mysteriously appeared on her kitchen table one day after she returned home from work. Her visitors were considerate, and according to the quality of the tool, not cheapskates.

“Rest in the guest room until dawn. I mean it,” said Sakura as she watched the ANBU slip the antibiotic pills through the hole in his mask, swallowing them. “The antidote needs to supplant the poison, and you need to be on your back so it can spread through your organs gradually. Running around would rush it.”

“You want me on my back?”

Sakura couldn’t help the flush that tarnished her neck as she glared at the ANBU, and ignored his soft chuckle.

“Don’t make double-entendre jokes. I deal with enough of that from the old shinobi at work,” muttered Sakura, crossing her arms. Glancing at the clock, she sighed and waved him away. “Go,” she said, swallowing a yawn. 

“Thank you,” said her guest sincerely, dutifully retiring to her guest-slash-recovery room.

“Uh huh,” yawned Sakura outright, rubbing at her face. She was due in surgery in three hours. Ugh.

It was several days later, as she left for work, that she realized new buds had sprouted in her front garden. Also, when she returned home and, with it being so quiet for once, she drank a cup of tea on her back porch, she noted her rear flower beds had been turned over and neatly hedged. Several rows of light green sprouts poked their heads out towards the fading sun, too.

Smiling to herself, Sakura’s shoulders relaxed.   
  
Being home on quiet nights was rather nice.

* * *

 

Tulips and hyacinths surrounded Sakura’s small house in a rainbow of colours. Among them other, later-blooming shoots promised more surprises to come. 

Every morning Sakura eagerly checked her gardens, front and back, for clues as to what would appear next. Someone had carefully planned and planted the flowers, she noted as each week passed, so that she would always have something to look forward to.

Not only did the flowers and healthy plants make Sakura happier, she also received compliments from her neighbours—who had stopped making passive aggressive comments about her ‘dirt piles’—and from her friends. Instead of her home being full of sick and wounded nin—well, perhaps ‘in addition to’ was more accurate—Sakura now entertained friends. They joined her in her garden and loved coming to see what was next to arrive. 

“This one is—”

“Shhh! Don’t tell me!” Sakura interrupted Ino.

Ino gave Sakura a look.

Sakura shrugged, a small blush on her cheeks as she rolled her glass of water between her hands. “I like the surprise.”

Sakura didn’t just like the surprise of seeing each new flower and plant bloom. She loved it. The garden was hers, it was beautiful, it made her feel special. That someone had taken the time to not only plan, but plant, nurture, and care for it meant someone considered her highly enough to be worth such care, too. She had tried to figure out who had gone to so much trouble to make her house feel like a home, but no one had fessed up. She wasn’t sure what else to do to thank them.

The sun had begun to set, the sky transitioning to the pinks and purples of her lilac bushes when Sakura almost missed the way Ino’s eyes had narrowed when she came to one particular plant.

“You’re still in touch with Sasuke.” said Ino, eyeing the tender shoot carefully before turning back to join Sakura on the rear porch.

“Hm? Not really,” said Sakura. She shrugged again. “I think that ship has sailed, at least for the foreseeable future.”

Saying nothing, Ino nodded once and sipped from her water.

* * *

 

When Sakura felt her traps shift for the third time in a single night, she groaned into her pillow.

“Go to the hospital,” she moan-cried from her bed.

Instead of listening, the stranger made his way from the window in her living room to her examination-slash-TV-room.

“I mean it,” she whined. 

“Where is your suture kit?” asked a familiar, gentle, if tired voice.

“All out.”

There was a soft huff, then a light thud.

Sakura was on her feet and running before she realized, completely bypassing her usual routine of at least putting on a pair of cotton pants over her sleep shorts.

“Shit.” The expletive fell from Sakura’s lips before she could help it when she saw the heavy trail of blood across her linoleum floor. 

“Hospital,” she said in a no-nonsense voice, rushing to her supply closet to grab gauze and bandages.

“No,” said her guest hoarsely, barely holding his insides in.

“I am wiped out of supplies due to the last two of your colleagues stopping in tonight,” argued Sakura, washing her hands at the sink before rushing to his side.

“No hospital,” he gasped as Sakura pushed his hands out of the way to get a better look at his oh shit sucking chest wound.

There was no time to get him to the hospital, no time to put a fresh sheet over the soon-to-be-ruined couch, no time to do anything but act. 

Summoning half a dozen chakra-clones to assist with the emergency surgery, Sakura reached for the ANBU’s blood-soaked armour and uniform.   
“I’m sorry, it needs to go,” she said as he grabbed her wrist weakly.

“Mask… stays…”

“It’ll stay as long as it doesn’t obstruct whatever measures I need to take to save your life.”

“Mask—”

“You want to live or you wouldn’t be here,” said Sakura, slicing open his shirt with a kunai. “Now bite down on this,” she said, passing a folded rag to him and raising his hand to his mouth. “I’m out of analgesics,” she added in apology.

* * *

 

Sakura’s hands shook the next morning as she formed the last hand-sign for her summoning jutsu.   
“Tell work I won’t be coming in today,” she wheezed.

“Will do!” said the tiny slug, barely larger than her garden variety cousins. It was all Sakura could manage.

“Thanks,” said Sakura.   
As the slug poofed away, she stood on trembling legs and stumbled to the kitchen to wash the blood off her arms and hands.

She didn’t quite make it to her room before she fell asleep on her feet and tumbled to the floor.

* * *

 

Naruto ran his hands through his hair for the  _ enth  _ time that afternoon.

“It wasn’t him,” he said, blue eyes desperate.

“You checked with him?” said Ino.

Naruto nodded. “It hasn’t been Sasuke coming to visit Sakura. He’s staying far away from Konoha to…” His voice trailed off and he looked away, emotion passing over his face.

“To protect her,” finished Ino, swirling her straw in her glass. “If you’re sure,” she said, standing.

The haunted, wounded look in Naruto’s blue eyes made Ino pause. She watched as he bit the inside of his lip, his eyes trying to communicate something to her.

Understanding dawned on Ino. Straightening her skirt and retaking her seat, Ino watched the relief flood Naruto’s wide eyes.

Still pleading with her without words, Naruto’s eyes revealed much to Ino. Her own eyes widened as she gently slipped into his mind, and he offered her the details he could not speak aloud. 

_ Oh… _

* * *

 

Sakura slipped in and out of dreams as her chakra restored and rebalanced itself after her exhaustion. Her raw hands mended in her sleep as her seal pumped healing energy throughout her body, from the tips of her toes to the top of her head.

When Sakura woke, three days later, she noticed the red, red flowers with the inky spots on them, sitting in a simple, elegantly sloped vase on her bedroom table.

There were more in her kitchen when she dragged herself from her bed to get a drink.

There were pockets of them in her gardens, she noted, sitting on her back porch to sort out her thoughts. In three corners, like a triangle, then a circular pocket of them in the middle—

A sudden memory loosened Sakura’s fingers around her glass, and her grip slipped, the glass tilting and spilling its water across her feet.

* * *

 

**The End.**

  
  


 

**Author's Note:**

> AN: No continuation of this fic is planned at this time. Thank you for reading.
> 
> AN: Since no continuation is planned, and in case anything is unclear: Naruto knows that Itachi is alive. Like many other PD (previously deceased) nin during the War, Itachi was resurrected. In this AU, some of those nin remained alive after their resurrection. As Itachi is a missing nin, and committed heinous crimes, Naruto can only pardon him if he remains ‘dead’. If Itachi is alive, he will be tried. He is an unofficial Konoha ANBU, which is why he can’t go to the hospital. He planted Uchiha-clan flowers (the poppies), the ones that used to border the interior of the Uchiha compound/district, around Sakura’s garden in the shape of his Mangekyou Sharingan. He is claiming her, in a way, but also revering her for the sacrifices she made in the war, in her childhood, and in her current life, to provide for Konoha. He has great respect for Sakura and her Will of Fire. Itachi recognizes that Sakura wants to move on, and tries to find ways to support her that demonstrate his respect for her, his desire for her happiness, and that don’t benefit him directly. More details explained on my tumblr (kendochick).


End file.
